e-songs breaking out of the midst of her scornful gibes: this is
a very subtle and suitable and poetical way of eliciting the
under-workings of the damsel's mind, and it is continued through five
or six pages in an interrupted carol, until at last the maiden, wholly
won, bids him ride by her side, and finishes her lay:

O trefoil, sparkling on the rainy plain,
O rainbow, with three colors after rain,
Shine sweetly: thrice my love hath smiled on me.

The allegory by which Gareth's four opponents are made to form a sort
of stumbling succession representing Morn, Noon, Evening, and Night or
Death, is hardly worth the introduction, but it is not insisted
upon: the last of these knights, besieging Castle Perilous in a skull
helmet, and clamoring for marriage with Lynette's sister Lyonors,
turns out to be a large-sized, fresh-faced and foolish boy, who issues
from the skull "as a flower new blown," and fatuously explains that
his brothers have dressed him out in burlesque and deposited him as a
bugbear at the gate. This is not very salutary allegorizing, but it
is soon over, and the poem closed, leaving a pleasant perfume in the
reader's mind of chivalry, errantry and the delicious days before the
invention of civilization.

Handbook of the History of Philosophy. By Dr. Albert Schwegler.
Translated arid annotated by James Hutchison Stirling, LL.D. New York:
Putnam.

Spinoza teaches that "substance is God;" but, says Mr. Matthew Arnold,
"propositions about substance pass by mankind at large like the idle
wind, which mankind at large regards not: it will not even listen to
a word about these propositions, unless it first learns what their
author was driving at with them, and finds that this object of his
is one with which it sympathizes." There is no way of getting the
multitude to listen to Spinoza's _Ethics_ or Plato's _Dialectics_ but
something is gained when a man of science like Dr. Schwegler happens
to possess the gift of fluent and easy statement, and can pour into a
work like the present, which is the expansion of a hasty encyclopaedia
article, the vivacity of current speech, and the impulse which gives
unity to a long history while it excludes crabbed digressions. It
happens that the American world received the first translation of
Schwegler's _History_ _of Philosophy_; and it may be asked, What need
have Americans of a subsequent version by a Scotch doctor of laws? The
answer is, that Mr. Seelye's earli